Well, I’m back at this thrilling blog after several months of computer woes, ready to pick up where I left off, towards the end of Captain America #2 and The Wax Statue story. As you may or may not recall, this story featured art by Reed Crandall, and there is still some degree of uncertainty as to whether he was inking as well as penciling over Kirby rough layouts. As we resume with page seven, there clearly seems to be no Crandall present here. It looks to me like fairly tight Kirby pencils with extensive Kirby inking in panels one through three and sub-par finishes in panels four and five.

Page nine is fairly unremarkable, with Kirby rough pencils probably finished by Joe Simon and again inked without much enthusiasm by Simon and perhaps a lesser hand. There does look like what appears to be an Al Avison face on the sergeant in panel one, but the reproduction is too poor for a clear identification.

Page ten is a rare beauty and a stand out, which I’m fairly confident is both drawn and inked by Reed Crandall. There are some exquisitely etched lines all throughout the page, most notably in the hand in panel two, in the drape of the clothes in panels three and four and in all of the faces. The mask hanging in the final panel is a dead giveaway as a Crandall standby. The POV angle looking down at the wonderful skull of the lab coated villain is a thing of gruesome beauty as well.

This page leaps out at you like no other in this book because of its obvious technical superiority and feels completely incongruous in comparison to most of the book. I would dearly love to see the original art or even a decent scan of the actual comic page, but alas, I have no such scans until issue five.

The last page featured here is a pretty nice penciling job by Kirby and it looks as if he shared the inking with Simon and possibly another less articulate hand. The last panel is remarkable for its nifty caricatures of James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. Kirby is clearly having some fun here with this sort of thing.

This will be the last post on Captain America #2, as there’s not much noteworthy in the final pages of this story. I’ll move on to issue three in the next post and we’ll get into some classic Skullduggery.